Pessimism is just an excuse to not try.

Yes, I am saying that.

And I gave criteria for a thought to be a belief, and for a mental state to be a thought, and for what makes a state mental, so I’m not sure what further criteria you want.

I think I’ve already answered that question so if there is something to my answer I’ve left out you’ll need to specify.

And yes language-less creatures can have thoughts, including beliefs. Nothing I’ve said is to the contrary.

Sure.

Beliefs are a kind of thoughts, thoughts with descriptive content, thoughts about how the world is, in contrast to intentions which are thoughts with prescriptive content, about how the world ought to be.

Thoughts more generally are reflexive feelings, where feelings likewise have descriptive and prescriptive versions, perceptions and desires. A thought is a perception of a feeling coupled with a desire for that feeling to remain, or else whatever feeling is desired in its stead: basically, a thought is what you feel you ought to feel, the mental states you judge to be the correct ones.

A feeling in turn is an interpretation of an experience, where experiences also have descriptive and prescriptive versions, namely sensations and appetites. Experiences are the uninterpreted raw input from an interaction between one’s mind and the rest of the world.

A mind is just a function of a physical system — namely, this kind of function I’ve been describing. There is also a qualitative, what-it’s-like phenomenal experience of being a mind, but that’s not a special thing of minds: everything has such a first-person experience, but what that experience is like varies with the function of the thing just like its behavior does — the function is a map from experience to behavior — and it is only minds proper, with functionality like I’ve been describing, that have a first person experience similar to the kind that we human minds have.

A thing with similar enough functionality does not technically have to be human: other animals, aliens, AIs, etc, can all in principle have similar enough functionality too.

:up:

People with less money spend more of it, increasing the velocity of money and so the productivity of the economy. If you take money from the rich and give it to the poor it will immediately be spent on whatever businesses are making whatever the most in demand things are, generating greater value than whatever a few rich people decide they value most.

Not sure if sarcasm or not, but in case not: those are all means for those with money to gamble with to gamble on the ventures of those without such money. If you have to borrow at interest to take your risks, then you’re extra boned when you almost certainly fail anyway, and a bunch of your winnings go to someone who’s already rich if you unexpectedly beat the odds.

Yep. And I also argue that appeal to popularity is also just an appeal to the authority of the crowd and so an appeal to faith, and appeal to intuition is effective an appeal to one’s own authority and so an appeal to faith. Properly critical reason means holding nothing beyond question no matter who or how many think or say it.

Politics is just another form of religion
— Harry Hindu

I agree, and I think this should be obvious. But the confused concept of the supernatural obscures how religion organizes group activity in the real world in the same way that a politics based on unquestioned secular concept/ideals does. Transcendence, justice, freedom, fairness, etc. Their force remains, even if one withdraws a traditional religious imagery from them. — Eee

I argue this very point in like the second paragraph of my book so thumbs up to both of you for making it too. All appeal to authority is fideistic. The supernatural only demands fideism because there is no evidence possible from which to reason about it.

Important point to note: those with more to start with can better afford to fail until they make it. If you’re living check to check and one failure would make you a homeless bum with worse odds than you had before, you can’t afford the risk. Most new business ventures fail, so most people who can only afford to try once will either play it safe by not trying, or fail. Those with a huge safety net can afford to take risks until they hit the jackpot.

I don’t think any real socialists villainize the rich as people, rather they figure that everybody is doing what they can to get ahead, and criticize systemic or institutional factors that give further advantages to those who are already ahead. If it was just a few bad apples, the problem would be a lot easier; but it’s not, it’s a system that gives all the apples to a few, if I may confuse the metaphor.

That sound like an answer to my question about the meaning of descriptive statement, yes.

'm criticizing, the spirit of the age - what happens when you take God out of the picture — Wayfarer

You'll note that I don't say anything at all about whether God exists until the very last chapter of my book. It's an open question, and most of the book is about how to go about answering questions. My philosophy isn't built around an absence of God; rather, the conclusion that nothing that would count as God is likely to exist is a consequence that falls out of more general questions.

Limited only to the description of physical reality, with the tacit assumption that reality is physical — Wayfarer

Where by "physical" I mean "empirical" and by "empirical" I mean "you could tell the difference between a world where it's true and a world where it's not". Non-physical things, by such definition, make no noticeable difference. Conversely, anything that makes any noticeable difference in the world is empirical for that reason, and so counts as physical by this definition.

because the reality science assumes is devoid of meaning, then meaning is provided by the individual - hence subjectivism and relativism [...] Hume's 'is/ought' problem in a nutshell — Wayfarer

You'll note that I am very much against subjectivism and relativism too. I think we agree that that is a major fault in modern society, that assumes that "is" is the only kind of question that has objective answers, and "ought" is all sentiment. I agree with the is/ought distinction inasmuch as I don't think "oughts" are reducible to "is", but I think Hume is completely wrong about how to deal with "oughts", and that there is a completely analogous way to treat them as objective, grounded in phenomenal experience, open to criticism, but not destroyed by infinite regressions -- just like the physical sciences treat reality.

The mystics I'm thinking of, are the Christian, Hindu and Buddhist mystics. — Wayfarer

Me too.

I am winding down for bed so this will be brief but then I’ll be mostly away for a few days so I want to reply with something.

Mostly I think you’re reading too much of your impression of a materialist into my philosophy when those elements aren’t there. I’m not familiar with the evidence about the paranormal things you describe and I’m skeptical about claims regarding them but on philosophical principle I don’t object to claims about such things, since they are in principle amenable to investigation and it’s just a contingent question as to how that investigation will turn out. Paranormal is not the same as supernatural.

I agree that the physical sciences have a limited domain, but that domain is only limited to the description of reality. Other kinds of activities, like prescribing morality, are outside the dominant of physical science. But that’s because such science says nothing about them, so you’re not going to end up in conflict with science about them. But if you’re saying something is real, but in a sense that we cannot tell the difference between this world where it’s supposedly real and a world where it wasn’t — which is all I mean by empirical — then it seems to me you’re not actually saying anything about reality at all. Maybe you’re emoting? I’ve got no problem with theological noncognitivism so long as it’s self-aware and not confused with cognitive claims.

On which note, I don’t think mystical experiences like you describe really count as evidence for any kind of descriptive claim about reality, because I’ve been a frequent recipient of them, a profound feeling of empty meaningfulness, as in feeling meaningfulness but not about anything in particular or for any reason, just an overwhelming feeling of awe, oneness, connectedness, etc, accompanying an otherwise mundane experience. I think such experiences are very important in a meaning of life way I’ll get into later (or just read my final essay), but insofar as it matters for figuring out what’s real or not, I recognize them for just the feelings that they are, not as some kind of glimpse into a deeper reality. (I feel here kind of like a Tolkien elf telling mortals that magic isn’t real, while having just done something that those mortals call “magic”).

As for that Descartes quote, I’ll just say that it begs the question. I know that AI isn’t there yet still, but it’s presumptive to declare that it is in principle impossible. That’s something we could have a much longer argument about, maybe in another thread.

I think the distinction you're making is quite artificial. After all, what is supernatural and what is not, are usually defined almost solely in terms of previous religious doctrines — Wayfarer

You'll note that in that essay (thank you for the praise BTW) I explicitly clarify what I mean by supernatural, and say that I'm not saying that any of the particular things that are called supernatural definitely don't exist -- just that if they exist, in any way that we can notice that their existence, then they are natural things. If some ghost hunters manage to actually capture incontrovertible evidence for ghosts, for example, I'm not going to say "that's supernatural so it doesn't count", I'm going to look forward to the amazing scientific discoveries that are sure to follow from this newly-confirmed unexplained phenomenon.

So if by "God" someone means something that has a noticeable effect on the universe, such that we could tell by looking at the universe whether or not such a being existed, then that's a natural phenomenon they're positing, and they're welcome to do science to it without any philosophical complaint from me -- but also vulnerable to science being done about it, perhaps to conclusions they don't like. Many people in modern ages therefore place their notion of God as something entirely beyond that kind of experiential import, which then puts it into the category of supernatural as I mean it, about which we can only believe one way or another on faith. (Look at all the agnostics and theists on this very forum who insist that atheism also be taken on faith, because God as they mean it is beyond the proof or disproof.)

reason itself does not have a natural explanation — Wayfarer

I'm not sure what you mean here. What exactly about reason is in need of an explanation? "How did humans come to be able to use reason?"? That is, as you say, not a philosophical question, but a biological one, and evolutionary explanations work just fine there. I suspect you mean something deeper and more philosophical than that though, or at least you want to mean that, but I'm not clear what it is exactly.

Thank you for your responses!

All attribution of meaning consists of correlations drawn between different things. I would not pursue a question about the meaning of descriptive statements.
— creativesoul
I don't understand what you're trying to say. — Pfhorrest

Did you understand the first claim? — creativesoul

You'll have to tell me if I understand you right. That sounds to me like you're saying all meaning is of the type meant by expressions like "clouds mean rain" and "smoke means fire": one thing signifies another thing, because of the correlation between those things. Is that what you mean by that claim? If so, what do you take statements that purport to describe reality to signify, or correlate with -- what do they mean? Or if you somehow object to asking that question, can you explain why?

Bonus question:
What do mathematical claims, about numbers and geometric shapes and such, mean, and how do they relate to descriptive claims about reality? — Pfhorrest

Oh boy, this is a fun one.

Mathematical claims are ultimately claims about the logical implications of definitions — you state some axioms that define what rules the imaginary objects under discussion are defined to obey, and then explore in more details the logical implications of objects that have to obey those rules. In one sense this is completely detached from any claims about reality -- at least, about concrete reality, the world that we can experience. But as I will elaborate in my answer to the next question, the actual existent objects of that concrete reality aren't the sorts of things that we ordinarily think of as "real", things like rocks and trees and such. Rather, those are themselves abstractions aware from the more fundamentally, concretely real things, projected behind the concrete reality we have direct contact with as an explanation of that. More and more abstract, and recognizably mathematical, objects are projected behind those things, the objects of our theories of physics. All of those things are "real" in an instrumental sense, lying in the intersection of abstract and concrete things: they are abstract objects that are instrumental in explaining concrete reality, and so concretely real to that extent.

But behind all of those, we aim to construct a single mathematical object that is a 1:1 map of concrete reality, a theory of everything. Whatever mathematical object that will turn out to be just is concrete reality: "concrete" is indexical, it signifies only the mathematical structure of which we are also a part. Other mathematical objects are just like it, ontologically, except that we aren't a part of them; they are purely abstract, with no connection to the object of which we are a part. This is unlike Platonism in that it doesn't posit that there is the world we're familiar with and then separately some kind of Heaven full of Forms. In terms comparable to that, I'd say that there are only Forms, no Heaven in which they exist, and one of those Forms just is the concrete universe we're familiar with (which, like most mathematical objects, is constructed out of lots and lots of copies of simpler objects, which is why we see other "Forms" expressed within our concrete world).

Americans often pride themselves on not having a monarchy, but ironically the president is essentially an elected king with monarchical powers, both head of state and head of government. The head of state aspect could be the reason why campaigns are longer and rife with so much emotion. — NOS4A2

What effective difference is there from a country like the UK where the head of state is powerless in practice, so only the head of government matters?

The Meaning of Reality
What do descriptive claims, that attempt to say what is real, even mean? — Pfhorrest

I hold to roughly the verificationist theory of meaning, but limited in domain to only descriptive propositions, those trying to say what is real. That is to say the such claims communicate an idea, a mental image (in more senses than just vision) of the world being some way, and an attitude toward that idea such that the idea is meant to fit the world: you should expect to find the world that way, and if you don’t, the idea is wrong, not the world.

I don’t think I’ve misunderstood you - I’m talking about how we then relate to what is false or immoral or what we claim ‘oughtn’t be’. Wisdom is more than just evaluating claims - it includes determining and initiating action in relation to those claims. I think that wisdom breaks down, for instance, when we isolate, exclude or attack what is but oughtn’t be. — Possibility

I don't think we disagree in the end. As I frame it, all action is driven by a combination of what we think is and what we think ought to be, so the practical upshot of evaluating both of those kinds of claims is always in driving our actions. And it is precisely those differences in evaluation between the two scales, what is but oughtn't be, or ought to be but isn't, that are the primary drivers of such action, as we act always to eliminate that difference, and make what (we think) is into what (we think) ought to be.

4.4 "What's my philosophy?" Don't be a fool (or an asshole) is the whole of philosophy; the rest, like the Rabbi says, is commentary. — 180 Proof

That's a great summary. (And I enjoy that, being point 4.4, it is the fourest point in your response. I like fourest things, it's in my name; I was even born at 4:44 PM).

I've been so busy I've been falling behind on answering my own questions one per other response, so I'll do a couple more now:

The Institutes of Philosophy
Who is to do philosophy and how should they relate to each other and others, socially speaking? — Pfhorrest

The question is largely whether philosophy is a personal activity, or an institutional one. Given that I have just opined that the faculty needed to conduct philosophy is literally personhood itself, it should come as no surprise that I think that philosophy is for each and every person to do, to the best of their ability to do so. Nevertheless, institutions are made of people, and I do value the cooperation and collaboration that has arisen within philosophy in the contemporary era, so I don't mean at all to besmirch professional philosophy and the specialization that has come with it. I merely don't think that the specialized, professional philosophers warrant a monopoly on the discipline. It is good that there be people whose job it is to know philosophy better than laypeople, and that some of those people specialize even more deeply in particular subfields of philosophy. But it is important that laypeople continue to philosophize as well, and that the discourse of philosophy as a whole be continuous between those laypeople and the professionals, without a sharp divide into mutually exclusive castes of professional philosophers and non-philosophers. And it is also important that some philosophers keep abreast of the progress in all of those specialties and continue to integrate their findings together into more generalized philosophical systems.

(I feel like I weirdly straddle all those divides, having some degree of professional education in the field but not nearly deep enough to teach it professionally, and working on a generalized philosophical system that draws from the more contemporary findings of all those specialties).

The Importance of Philosophy
Why do philosophy in the first place, what does it matter? — Pfhorrest

On the one hand, doing philosophy is literally practice at being a person, exercising the very faculty that differentiates persons from non-persons. Doing philosophy literally helps develop you into a better person, increasing your self-awareness and self-control, improving your mind and your will, and helping you to find meaning in the world, both in the sense of descriptive understanding, and in the sense of prescriptive purpose.

But also, as I already elaborated upthread, I think philosophy is sort of the lynch pin of all human endeavors. All the many trades involve using some tool to do some job. Technology administers those tools, business administers those jobs; engineers make new tools, entrepreneurs make new jobs; the physical sciences find more "natural tools" for the engineers to work with, and the ethical sciences I propose would find more "natural jobs" (i.e. needs that people have) for the entrepreneurs to work toward. Both those physical and ethical sciences depend on philosophy for the tools they need to do their jobs. Philosophy in turn relies on the tools of language, mathematics, and the arts to do its job, and then reflexively also examines those topics, as well as itself.

I drew a picture:

If you think a proposition P is meaningless, then you cannot believe(P), so you do not-believe(P). That's different from if you believe(not-P), which, yes, would require that P means something to you. If you believe(undefined-G), and that it's not possible to believe undefined things, then you still do not-believe(G).

Thank you both for your responses!

Note: I’m not entirely sure what ‘metaphilosophy’ means in modern parse? — I like sushi

"Philosophy of philosophy", pretty much. (Some take it to mean a separate field which studies the field of philosophy, and some of those people argue that there is no such field as metaphilosophy, because the study of the field of philosophy is just philosophy itself. But I mean it in the "philosophy of philosophy" sense: the philosophical investigation of philosophy itself).

All attribution of meaning consists of correlations drawn between different things. I would not pursue a question about the meaning of descriptive statements. — creativesoul

I don't understand what you're trying to say. These two sentences to me sound like they're contradicting each other. In the first one you say what all meaning consists of. In the second you say you would not pursue a question about a particular kind of meaning. If it helps for me to clarify, the "descriptive" there is to distinguish it from the later question about prescriptive statements, because some people hold that those kinds of things mean different kinds of things. If you think they mean the same kind of things that's fine, you can give the same answer for both.

According to the position you're arguing for and/or from, what does all human thought and belief consist of? — creativesoul

I'm not arguing for or from any position in the OP, I'm asking what your (or anyone's) position is.

And that question, "what does belief consist of", sounds to me like it's either a question about what the contents of a belief are like, or what the process of believing is like, I'm not sure which you mean. But two of my questions are meant to ask those same things.

The question about what descriptive statements mean is meant to ask the same thing as what the content of a belief is like, because to believe something is to think that it is true or real, and a descriptive statement is asserting that something is true or real, so agreeing with a descriptive statement is the same thing as believing what is stated, and the meaning of the statement is the content of the belief. I think that's probably what you mean, because your answer sounds like an answer to that question, but again I'm not sure.

If you mean instead to ask what the process of believing is like, that's what the question about the mind is about: what is it that does the believing, and what exactly is that thing doing when it believes something? If you mean something else entirely, and not either of these things, you'll need to elaborate because I'm lost.

I don't completely understand what you're saying, but it sounds to me like that's all aiming to answer the question about the meaning of descriptive statements. So I'm still not sure what questions you think are lacking.

I prefer grounded/rooted instead of "dissolved". Is the difference merely semantic? — 180 Proof

(I'm not really arguing for the following position right now, but rather offering it as an explanation for why I chose the set of questions I did, and why they have a meta-ethical vibe to them but are still supposed to cover the important questions of normative ethics. I don't mean to specifically push this position as part of posing the questions, but rather I was deliberately unorthodox as to whether the questions were meta-ethical or normative so as to be inclusive of such a view).

When I say normative ethics should be "dissolved", I mean the demarcation of that as its own subfield of philosophy should be broken down, not anything about any of the questions it attempts to answer. I think that once you have answered questions about what prescriptive statements mean, the criteria by which to judge them, and the methods by which to apply those criteria -- basically the metaethical subfields of moral semantics, moral ontology, and moral epistemology, although I would dispute that those are technically "ontology" and "epistemology" because of the semantics I endorse -- the rest is applied ethics. Metaethical answers tell you how to judge good from bad, moral from immoral; actually making specific contingent a posteriori judgements of particular things as good, bad, moral, immoral, etc, is then applied ethics. So basically, there are no questions that normative ethics uniquely investigates, so it doesn't need to be its own field.

Explain. Science informs ethics (all of philosophy) but conflating ethics with science neither follows nor makes sense. Maybe I'm missing your meaning. — 180 Proof

Yeah. I don't mean the physical sciences, I mean an ethical analogue of the physical sciences. I'm very much against attempts to reduce ethical questions to physical-science questions, but I think there ought to be a prescriptive analogue of that descriptive endeavor. I'll just quote from my essay A Note On Ethics:

I am of the peculiar opinion that applied ethics is not properly speaking a branch of philosophy at all, but is rather the seed of an entire field of underdeveloped ethical sciences, parallel to the physical sciences, concerned not with building theories (descriptive models, complex beliefs) to satisfy all of our sensations or observations, but instead strategies (prescriptive models, complex intentions) to satisfy all of our appetites. Furthermore, I hold that the field of normative ethics is something of a mutt, and as such should be dissolved entirely into the two other sub-fields of ethics. On the one hand, I think something like a normative ethical model, a general and all-encompassing model of what is good, is what the most general and fundamental of the ethical sciences should aim to build, but based on the a posteriori phenomenal experience of our contingent appetites rather than a priori philosophizing, akin to how fundamental models of physics are built on a posteriori phenomenal experience of our contingent senses. That most general and fundamental subfield of the ethical sciences, playing the foundational role to them that physics plays to the physical sciences, is what I think deserves to be called "ethics" simpliciter. That field's task would be to catalogue the needs or ends, and the abilities or means, of different moral agents and patients, like how physics catalogues the functions of different particles.

Building atop that field, the ethical analogue of chemistry would be to catalogue the aggregate effects of many such agents interacting, as much of the field of economics already does, in the same way that chemical processes are the aggregate interactions between many physical particles. Atop that, the ethical analogue of biology would be to catalogue the types of organizations of such agents that arise, and the development and interaction of such organizations individually and en masse, like biology catalogues organisms. Lastly, atop that, the ethical analogue of psychology would be to catalogue the educational and governmental apparatuses of such organizations, which are like the self-awareness and self-control, the mind and will so to speak, of such organizations. Like the physical sciences naturally feed into engineering and technology, I propose that these ethical sciences naturally feed into entrepreneurship and business, as all of those endeavors are ultimately about value: things like wealth, power, and freedom all boil down ultimately to the ability to fulfill intentions, desires, or appetites, to avoid pain and suffering and obtain pleasure and flourishing. I hold that such ethical sciences — contingent, a posteriori applications of the philosophy of morality and justice — are the bridge to ever more useful businesses, in the same way that the physical sciences are the bridge from the philosophy of reality and knowledge — of which they are contingent, a posteriori applications — to ever more useful technologies. And just as those physical sciences have over time largely supplanted religious authority in the educational social role, so too I hold that these ethical sciences should in time supplant state authority in the governmental social role, as I will elaborate upon in my later essay on politics and governance.

Yeah, well, I wanted to post my responses to your questions sooner rather than later and they had to be sketches outlines highlights fragments etc to do so. — 180 Proof

Oh I wasn't complaining at all, I felt like you answered everything completely. I was just answering your question about whether the questions were meant to be meta-ethical or normative. My answer is "yes", because I think that a complete meta-ethics just gives you what would normally be called a normative ethics for free.

Thanks for elaborating.

The questions about reality and knowledge are all about that. Meaning asks what the content of a thought or belief is, Subjects asks what's doing the thinking and believing, Objects and Methods are about on what grounds and in what ways to go about deciding what to think and believe, Institutions is about how to arrange the social application of that process, and Importance is about, well, the importance of all that.

Weak atheism just is non-theism, that's its definition. And "don't believe there are any" is distinguished from "believe there are none"; that's the main point here. It's clearer if we write it in functional notation, which I thought I already did earlier in this thread, but I'll try to do it more thoroughly this time. Let "G" be the proposition "God exists", whatever that means:

Someone is a theist if and only if they believe(G).

Thus someone is a non-theist if and only if they do not-believe(G): if it is not the case that they believe(G) like a theist would. This is also what "weak atheism" means: just non-theism. Ignostics, most agnostics (there are some agnostic theists, who believe but don't think they know), and so on all fall into this category.

But that's a different thing from someone who does believe(not-G). That's what "strong atheism" means. Anyone who does believe(not-G) obviously also does not-believe(G), but the reverse isn't true; not everyone who does not-believe(G) also does believe(not-G).

All kinds of modal operations work like this; that's the main deal of modal logic. Just because it's not-necessary(P) doesn't mean it's necessary(not-P). Just because it's not-obligatory(Q) doesn't mean it's obligatory(not-Q). Just because one does not-desire(F) doesn't mean they desire(not-F). And just because one does not-believe(G) doesn't mean they believe(not-G).

But for all of these, either you function(object) or you not-function(object), so in the case of believe(G), either you do or you do not. But just saying you do not-believe(G) doesn't mean you believe(not-G).

Does one's philosophy have the burden of following all of the conventional distinctions?

:brow: — creativesoul

I'm not sure I understand this question. Can you elaborate?

Law of Non-Contradiction. :wink: — 180 Proof

Thanks. So your only criteria for judging the truth is a description proposition is that it's not self-contradictory? Every self-consistent descriptive proposition is true?

the questions in the OP seem to have a more metaethical focus or I took them that way. — 180 Proof

I mean them to span both metaethics and normative ethics, but to have a generally metaethical framing, because I hold that normative ethics should be dissolved into metaethics on the one hand (which is all philosophy should be concerned with) and applied ethics on the other (which should be developed into a whole suite of contingent, a posteriori ethical sciences). But questions like the criteria for judging moral claims and the methods for applying that judgement are meant to yield what is effectively a normative ethical theory (e.g. if your criterion is maximizing pleasure and your method is just do whatever's descriptively most likely to do that, you end up a utilitarian; if your criterion is universalizability consistent with will and your method is always treating everyone as a means rather than an ends or something along those lines, you're a Kantian deontologist).

getting from the component chemicals to the highly complex molecule without the benefit of evolution (which is, of course, only possible with DNA). — Chris Hughes

Evolution isn't impossible without DNA. I posted about this upthread, let me quote myself:

all it would take is some circular chain of chemical reactions (A + B + energy = C + D, C + D + energy = E + F, E + F + energy = A + B, etc) to start off an evolutionary process, where the chemicals in those chains proliferate more and any chemicals that enable faster/shorter/more efficient chains would then proliferate even more until you end up with some kind of self-replicating molecule dominating the environment, and what we ended up with was DNA in that role. The question is just which steps exactly lead to that particular outcome. — Pfhorrest

emotions are just a reflection of beliefs, they follow that, so they have no blame in themselves for anything — OmniscientNihilist

I used to think that, but now I have to disagree. For the past year I've been finding my thinking at the mercy of a rollercoaster of emotions the likes of which I never knew before. I start feeling the emotions physically first, without any apparent prompt, and then over time as the emotions linger I find that my mind latches on to things to try to blame them on, and so my thinking turns dark as well. I'm aware in those states that previously I had thought differently, and I try to remind myself of what I thought then and why, but it doesn't make the emotions go away. Then in time they go away of their own accord, or for reasons I haven't completely sorted out, and I start thinking clearly again, and see the ways that I thought while those feelings were drowning me as incorrect, and I make mental notes about all the fallacies involved in them to remind myself later when I feel that way again that the thoughts I end up thinking are wrong. But that's still not effective, and the thoughts don't go away until the feelings do.

Sorry, I'm being a bit ahistorical in my terminology. I was thinking of things like Nietzsche contra Wagner, and thinking of Wagner in terms of "Nazi sympathizers" for his views' concordance with theirs (in the way that contemporary people with similar views are sometimes described), neglecting to think about the time periods involved and the impossibility of literally sympathizing with literal Nazis who didn't exist yet.

I’m enjoying this thread - I have used the questions to try and order my own thoughts, — Possibility

I'm happy to hear that, that's exactly what I hoped for. :-)

but my answers are perhaps too lengthy and disjointed at this stage, so I’m going to try and offer some discussion instead. — Possibility

I look forward to seeing them when you feel they're worth sharing; meanwhile, discussion is great too.

I think this definition invites a limited view of wisdom. What we discern as ‘falsehood’ or ‘bad’, ‘unreal’ or ‘immoral’ is as much a part of wisdom as what is ‘good’ or ‘real’. Determining how to effectively integrate predictions, imagination and ‘immoral’ thoughts or intentions as useful information is, in my view, as important to the pursuit of wisdom as reality or morality. I don’t think it’s as dichotomous as discerning truth from falsehood or ‘good’ from ‘bad’, but rather the capacity to structure and restructure our conceptual systems to integrate ALL information about the world, not just in relation to reality or morality, but in order to more completely understand ourselves and the universe. — Possibility

I'm not sure I understand you, and that makes me wonder if perhaps you misunderstood me. I was trying to say that wisdom is basically being able to evaluate both descriptive and prescriptive claims: where descriptive claims are those about what is or isn't, what's true or false, what's real or unreal; and prescriptive claims are those about what ought or oughtn't be, what's good or bad, what's moral or immoral. It sounds like you're saying that figuring out what's false, bad, unreal, or immoral is just as important as figuring out what's true, good, real, and moral; and I meant that to be implied by what I said before. Wisdom is the ability to discern one from the other (in both dimensions), or at least to place ideas somewhere in relation to each other on each of those scales. For the purposes (as will be elaborated later) of telling both where we are and where to go, figuratively speaking, and thus how to get there from here.

I don't think the mean income has any meaning in a distribution where the high figures are so huge compared to the lower ones. What are the actual figures? — Tim3003

That huge difference between high and low figures is exactly what I'm talking about, and what makes it the case that the vast majority of people would benefit greatly from something that just moved them closer to average: because only a tiny number of people get most of the money. Approximate figures from memory: the mean personal income is about $50k/yr (which falls at about the 75th percentile), the median personal income is about $25k/yr, and the mode personal income (that I recall less clearly) is about $13-15k/yr. (I remember it being just slightly more than half the median). Household income figures (more commonly reported) are about twice that, because households on average have about two people in them.

I think in the UK poverty is defined as half the median, but I'm guessing there's less income inequality here than in the US - although the gap has probably narrowed over the last decade. — Tim3003

I think the poverty line in the US is defined at the bottom quintile.

it's a matter of inferred fact, not observed fact — Gnomon

Inferential knowledge is still knowledge though, so would you not still say that you know that God exists? Like, if someone claimed that he did not, would you not have some argument, appealing to those inferences you've made, to try to convince them that in fact he does?

I would say that fictional characters do not exist, at least not in the concrete sense of existence that we're implicitly talking about, the kind of existence that we apply to ordinary things in contexts outside of philosophy. (I hold that fictional characters are a kind of fuzzy abstract object, and that abstract objects "exist" only in a different sense than the ordinary concrete one).

In any case though, the position you're describing does still fit into the category of weak atheism, which is simply the category of everything that is not theism. That's the point of distinguishing weak and strong atheism: weak atheism is the broad category of anything that isn't theism, while strong atheism is a narrower position within that range. It's a little like referring to locations as "terrestrial", "extra-terrestrial", and "martian". By definition everywhere that isn't terrestrial is extra-terrestrial, but being martian is only one subset of being extra-terrestrial. This analogy is imperfect because it's not like Mars is the anti-Earth or something, so maybe colors make a better analogy: every color is either white or non-white, but black is just one specific non-white color; despite being the opposite of white, not everything non-white is black.

I would say that the position your describing fits the label of Ignosticism too, though. Theological noncognitivism is something a little different, the claim that religious language is not even trying to be descriptive but is merely emotive, as seen in expressions like "God is love".

You'll note that I didn't impute anything antisemitic into my impression of Nietzsche, specifically because I know he tried to distance himself from Nazi sympathizers. My comment was aimed mainly at his love of masculine power fantasies, coupled with a touch of probable (historically common) xenophobia and stereotypes of Asians being less masculine.

It ignores the huge bulk of the middle class — Tim3003

There is not a huge bulk of middle class. That was my point. About 75% of people make less than the mean income. About 50% of people make less than HALF of the mean income, i.e. the median is half the mean. The mode (the amount that the largest group makes) is close to half of the median, or a quarter of the mean. The vast, vast majority of people are way, way below average.

If you taxed everyone half of their income and gave them half of the mean income in return, more than half of the population would profit from that to the tune of over $1000/mo, and half of the remainder (the third quarter) would still profit more than they lost, most of the last quarter would lose very little because most of them aren't very far above the mean, and nobody in the country would make less (after taxes) than what is currently the median income.

But like you, they don't realize that, which is probably why they're not in favor of policies that would help the poor. They don't realize that they are the poor.

Do you think his Mother and Father would agree with that? Do they feel harmed? — Mark Dennis

That depends on what they believe about the situation. If they agree that he has not been harmed (which, again, seems like a stretch given the most likely assumptions to make about fleshing out this scenario, since he probably will suffer some consequences in the future), then they will not suffer empathically for him. If they think otherwise, they will feel otherwise.

So if a man dies not knowing he raised the offspring of another man with an adulterous wife, he has not been harmed by it? What if as he dies he firmly believes his line will continue, when in reality it dies with him? Can we assume that if he could have known he would feel greatly hurt and betrayed by this knowledge? A person doesn't have to know that their perceived truth is a lie for it to be harmful to them. — Mark Dennis

I suppose this does require a slight modification of my stated position. I'm fuzzy-headed this morning so this might not be my best seat-of-my-pants philosophizing, but I'd say that if a person only never suffers the consequences of an action against him because of something like his own death, and unbeknownst to him desires that he thought had been fulfilled were actually not fulfilled, in a way that he could have discovered at some point but just by chance did not, then he was still harmed.

I meant I liked the way the contents of the link are laid out. — I like sushi

Oh okay, thanks then.

Your historical account sounds accurate enough to me, but doesn't really say anything against what I was saying before, except inasmuch as you might want "religion" to mean something different than I mean by it. But inasmuch as religion is not fideistic as I've defined it, it doesn't really differ from any irreligious practices, and to that extent I have nothing against it, and don't consider it unphilosophical. Natural theology, for instance, is perfectly philosophical in my book, at least in the project it tries to undertake. But inasmuch as God is supposed to be a supernatural thing, I think it can't help but fail in that undertaking, because supernatural things by their very nature have no effect on the world that we experience (if they did, they would be natural), so we cannot tell anything about whether or not they are real, and so can only appeal to faith for claims about them.

That is different from my take on abstract objects, which I will get to later. For now...

The Subjects of Philosophy
What are the faculties that enable someone to do philosophy, to be a philosopher? — Pfhorrest

I hold that all that is needed, strictly speaking, is personhood. Rather, I hold personhood to be defined as the possession of the faculty needed to conduct philosophy, which is sapience. "Sapience" literally means just "wisdom" in Latin, but I mean it in a more technical sense as a reflexivity of the mind and will; as self-awareness and self-control, the ability to have opinions about your opinions, to be aware of what you are thinking, to assess whether you are thinking the correct things, and if you deem that you are not, to cause yourself to think differently. This reflexivity allows you to look upon your thoughts in the third person as though they were someone else's thoughts that you were judging, allowing you to assess the validity of the inferences you make, and so to do logic, to tease apart the relations between your various ideas. That reflexivity also allows you to put yourself in the place of another person and imagine what influence it would have on them if you were to make an argument in one way or another, and so to do rhetoric, to package and deliver your ideas in a way to make them easy to accept.

Hurray, discussion is being generated. :-)

The Method of Philosophy
How is philosophy to be done? — Pfhorrest

Philosophy is done not so much by solving problems, but by dissolving them: showing apparent paradoxes and dilemmas that would seem to stand in the way of any route toward wisdom to actually be the result of confused thinking, conflated terms or ideas, etc. By teasing apart that confusion, differentiating conflated terms and ideas from each other, and so on, philosophy can progress toward wisdom by showing those apparent roadblocks to have actually been illusory all along. More generally, philosophy makes headway best when it analyzes concepts in light of the practical use we want to put them to, asking why do we need to know the answer to some question, in order to get at what we really want from an answer to that question, and so what an answer to it should look like, and how to go about identifying one.

In analyzing concepts and teasing them apart from each other, philosophy makes extensive use of the tools of mathematical logic. But in exhorting its audience to care to use one of those teased-apart concepts for some practical purpose, instead of endlessly seeking answers to the uselessly confused and so perpetually unanswerable question that they may be irrationally attached to as some kind of important cosmic enigma, philosophy must instead use the tools of the rhetorical arts. Thus philosophy uses the tools of the abstract disciplines, mathematics and the arts, to make progress in its job of enabling the more practical sciences to in turn do their jobs of expounding on the details of what is real and moral.

If a simple view of "populism" would be the political version of "give the people what they want", then of course it will dominate in an open democracy. — ZhouBoTong

That would then entail that some kind of socialism should dominate in an open democracy, whether under that name or not, since the thing that most people want is the easement of their material suffering, and since wealth and income are distributed in such a way that most people have far less than the average (mean), the vast majority of people could get that material suffering eased at the expense of the tiny minority who hold all the wealth.

Put it this way: if a law were passed that levied a tax of X% of your income but gave you a tax credit of X% the mean income, in a country with an income distribution like the US about 75% of people would get more than they pay, and the whole thing would be neutral on the national budget because that's how math works. (Assuming X<100).

Yet people don't vote for things like that. Which suggests either that your thesis is wrong, or that we don't really have an open democracy. I lean toward the latter.

Thanks for the continuing replies! I'm surprised to find myself continuing to agree with you as much as I do; I expected our views to have diverged a lot more by this point.

I guess I can answer another of my own questions now...

The Objects of Philosophy
What is philosophy aiming for, by what criteria would we judge success or at least progress in philosophical endeavors? — Pfhorrest

Philosophy aims for wisdom, in other words to discover or create a means of discerning truth from falsehood and good from bad, and it progresses in that endeavor by clarifying confused concepts about those scales of evaluation. The emergence of, loosely speaking, "the scientific method" is the greatest bit of philosophical progress in the history of the field, in my view, and though progress in moral investigations has been much slower, we're still slowly crawling there with increased emphasis on liberty, democracy, and material well-being, and less on things like ritual purity and obedience.

:point: